Allah:
The scapegoat for defeat in 2012 was opposition to immigration reform. Sounds like the scapegoat for defeat this year will be conservative media and advocacy groups. Isn’t it interesting how Beltway Republicans’ least favorite elements of the party are perpetually to blame for its failures instead of, say, the persistent lack of a compelling GOP middle-class agenda.
What they really want to overhaul here is their own base. The problem for the party this year in the primaries, glaringly exposed by Trump, is that the business-class Republicanism favored by the GOP leadership has only a small constituency among the rank and file. The base is a mishmash of nationalists/reactionaries, movement conservatives, and the great mass of less ideological married whites who lean Republican for more bottom-line reasons. The problem for the party leadership is that they want to reduce their base to the last group but can’t win without the support of the first two. There are simply too many ideologues. The math isn’t there. So they need to somehow re-engineer the ideologues to become less ideological. How do you do that? They … don’t really know, apart from some throat-clearing about populist conservative outlets behaving more responsibly.
They regard Trump as the symptom of a disease that afflicts the GOP and fear that emergency restructuring is needed to prevent massive losses among racial minorities that are a growing share of the electorate and have generally accelerated every presidential election cycle since 1992…
“You have to have a culture change as a party. You have to be very comfortable being disliked by loud, disruptive, negative voices that have only one goal and that goal is to tear down the brand of the Republican Party,” Josh Holmes said this week during an interview with the Washington Examiner’s “Examining Politics” podcast…
“It’s time for the conservative commentariat industry to be more responsible and focus on winning elections,” said GOP strategist Brad Todd, who advises House and Senate candidates…
“So long as some of the most powerful voices in conservative media spend more time attacking Republicans than Democrats, the Democrats will hold the White House,” a Republican strategist who has advised multiple GOP presidential candidates said.
One idea mentioned in the piece for “overhauling” the party is more intervention by the leadership in primaries. Next time, the theory goes, they’ll take a firmer hand in marginalizing a Trump figure before he starts rolling. But … that that wouldn’t do anything to make ideologues less ideological. If anything, it might do the opposite. Remember, the donor class considered moving aggressively against Trump this year but held off for the understandable reason that it might have increased populist support for him. They bet on him failing on his own and feared that trying to give him a nudge towards the exit would anger populists — the system is rigged! — and backfire by reinvigorating Trump’s candidacy. Besides which, Ramesh Ponnuru is right that it’s odd for party insiders to conclude that more meddling in primaries is the answer given that they’ve done that before, in 2014, and it didn’t prevent the Trump crisis that’s upon them now. “[T]here’s not a word here from any of the insiders about the fact that large numbers of Republican voters are indifferent at best to the party’s economic agenda,” says Ponnuru of the piece quoted above. “The storyline here is that what happened in 2016 is just a repetition of what happened in 2010 and 2012.” The Trump phenomenon is purportedly no different from the Christine O’Donnell phenomenon in the Delaware primary six years ago. They’ve learned nothing.
The only thing that will make ideologues less ideological, I think, is continued defeat. That’s what led Sean Hannity to flip, however briefly, on comprehensive immigration reform a few days after the 2012 election. Eventually you get tired of losing and become more willing to convince yourself that some core beliefs aren’t really all that “core” and can honorably be dropped.
